U.S. Politics

[chrisp65]

I think there’s a tremendous danger that we can fall in the same trap watching the U.S. as many did watching the UK.

The left can be vociferous and can swarm on social media if you’re already anywhere near that particular social media bubble.

But lots n lots of everyday folk in Colorado aren’t posting memes. Lots of folk in Phoenix think gun laws are more important than welfare.

That the Democrats haven’t chosen Sanders should be absolutely no surprise. That Sanders has ‘partially won the war’ by dragging the Dems leftward, might have actually partially won an internal war that costs the real war. 

[HanoiVillan]

10 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I think there’s a tremendous danger that we can fall in the same trap watching the U.S. as many did watching the UK.

The left can be vociferous and can swarm on social media if you’re already anywhere near that particular social media bubble.

But lots n lots of everyday folk in Colorado aren’t posting memes. Lots of folk in Phoenix think gun laws are more important than welfare.

That the Democrats haven’t chosen Sanders should be absolutely no surprise. That Sanders has ‘partially won the war’ by dragging the Dems leftward, might have actually partially won an internal war that costs the real war. 

What's the dynamic you are expecting this to play out as?

[VILLAMARV]

While there's a lot of truth in that about social media bubbles, I can't help but think there's a bit of rewriting of history to fit the narratives. Sanders was clearly more popular with the voters than HRC in 2016 iirc. And many of the people I spoke to in the run-up to the election last time were amazed the party thought HRC was electable whether against trump or anyone else. 

[sharkyvilla]

It's a shame Andrew Cuomo isnt the Democratic candidate.

[chrisp65]

4 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

What's the dynamic you are expecting this to play out as?

If, as has been suggested, we have Biden as he was the candidate to beat Sanders. But we also have a slightly more Sanders influenced more left tinged platform of policies. Then I’d see that working to strengthen Trump’s chances of 4 more years.

I’ve not Yet looked at actual policy much, to see if the Sandersisation is true. He’s certainly still asking people to vote for him so he will have more influence. He’s still on the ballot. But perhaps it doesn’t even need to be true. It just needs to be believed by the voters.

[villakram]

Biden has stated that he would veto universal health care if made president to donors.

1994 crime bill, 1998 financial reforms, 2001 patriot act, 2002/3 iraq war, 2005 removing student bankruptcy provisions and having the insurance company's backs (2013). The senator from Delaware (a financial haven) has voted against the interests of the "people" every chance he has had in is long career. Not to mention being against bussing, helping Clarence Thomas get in the SC and he gave the oration at Strom Thrumond's funeral.

A serious question. Name a couple of things Trump has done that have effected the lives or ordinary Americans to the same scale as Biden? A bunch of them will take time to play out, fair enough, and the tax breaks etc., are certainly against the "people", but hardly more so than what Biden has done.

What a sorry state of affairs.

Edited April 9, 2020 by villakram

[HanoiVillan]

15 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

If, as has been suggested, we have Biden as he was the candidate to beat Sanders. But we also have a slightly more Sanders influenced more left tinged platform of policies. Then I’d see that working to strengthen Trump’s chances of 4 more years.

I’ve not Yet looked at actual policy much, to see if the Sandersisation is true. He’s certainly still asking people to vote for him so he will have more influence. He’s still on the ballot. But perhaps it doesn’t even need to be true. It just needs to be believed by the voters.

I think you're massively over-rating how much voters vote based on policy in presidential elections.

[chrisp65]

1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

I think you're massively over-rating how much voters vote based on policy in presidential elections.

 

No, I know they don’t vote on actual policy. They vote on feels. It could ‘feel’ like the Dems have gone socialist, which Trump would exploit mercilessly.

If they voted on actual policy, then the left would get a clean sweep of anyone that might ever need social security or medical attention or fair policing or equality.

[Keyblade]

2 minutes ago, villakram said:

Biden has stated that he would veto universal health care if made president to donors.

1994 crime bill, 1998 financial reforms, 2001 patriot act, 2002/3 iraq war, 2005 removing student bankruptcy provisions and having the insurance company's backs (2013). The senator from Delaware (a financial haven) has voted against the interests of the "people" every chance he has had in is long career. Not to mention being against bussing, helping Clarence Thomas get in the SC and he gave the oration at Strom Thrumond's funeral.

A serious question. Name a couple of things Trump has done that have effected the lives or ordinary Americans to the same scale as Biden? A bunch of them will take time to play out, fair enough, and the tax breaks etc., are certainly against the "people", but hardly more so than what Biden has done.

What a sorry state of affairs.

The fact that the last 2 nominees have both voted for the Iraq war (in Biden's case admitting he knew that Saddam didn't have WMD's despite declaring so on the senate floor in '02) and both against the guy who was against it at the time is just...disconcerting. That's a strike one, you're out disqualifier in my book.

[Keyblade]

2 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

 

No, I know they don’t vote on actual policy. They vote on feels. It could ‘feel’ like the Dems have gone socialist, which Trump would exploit mercilessly.

If they voted on actual policy, then the left would get a clean sweep of anyone that might ever need social security or medical attention or fair policing or equality.

And this is where the media comes heavily into play. They help manufacture these feels. This goes both ways with the FOX wing of course.

[HanoiVillan]

47 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

 

No, I know they don’t vote on actual policy. They vote on feels. It could ‘feel’ like the Dems have gone socialist, which Trump would exploit mercilessly.

If they voted on actual policy, then the left would get a clean sweep of anyone that might ever need social security or medical attention or fair policing or equality.

It's surely just as likely that voters will *feel* that the Dems precisely haven't gone socialist, because the moderate won and Sanders didn't.

[Xann]

[chrisp65]

50 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

It's surely just as likely that voters will *feel* that the Dems precisely haven't gone socialist, because the moderate won and Sanders didn't.

 

I guess we’ll find out soon enough, my original point was, don’t fall for hearing lots n lots of kind left stuff and presuming that’s appealing to American voters.

You get one coffee shop in Austin full of apple laptops banging out lots of lefty social media. It doesn’t make Texas a Democrat win. 

[HanoiVillan]

12 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

 

I guess we’ll find out soon enough, my original point was, don’t fall for hearing lots n lots of kind left stuff and presuming that’s appealing to American voters.

You get one coffee shop in Austin full of apple laptops banging out lots of lefty social media. It doesn’t make Texas a Democrat win. 

I think you're parodying a point that I'm absolutely not making, at all.

[chrisp65]

1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

I think you're parodying a point that I'm absolutely not making, at all.

No, I’m really not. I’m just trying to stick to my original point. I think we can be lured in to thinking the world loves Bernie and Jeremy.

No parody, it might read a bit arsey, I’m tired. Been a weird week.

I’ve been reading up a fair bit around the generality of American politics, and their sense of their culture, it’s fascinating. I’d never ever claim to have any sort of inside line, I’m just trying to get to grips with it.

[bickster]

35 minutes ago, Xann said:

Sorry but this is nonsense, the centre ground in any political age is somewhere roughly in the middle of the extremes of opinion, therefore it is the top line not the bottom that is closer to reality in American politics. It can't really be compared to the rest of the world, it is its own microcosm based on its ludicrous political system. Therefore Sanders is far left and whoever that is he other side of Trump is far right. And on that scale its only really an economic thing  not a social thing. The sooner people stop simplifying things and labelling them left or right etc the better. Politics isn't really about left and right, they are silly labels. Politics is really more of a circular thing fascism is just an extreme form of socialism, they have more in common than either the fascists or the socialists are prepared to admit. Left and right are not fixed points, they are the the extremes of the current age and change considerably with time

[Xann]

1 minute ago, bickster said:

Politics isn't really about left and right, they are silly labels.

I agree with that bit, totally outmoded.

[HanoiVillan]

2 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

No, I’m really not. I’m just trying to stick to my original point. I think we can be lured in to thinking the world loves Bernie and Jeremy.

No parody, it might read a bit arsey, I’m tired. Been a weird week.

I’ve been reading up a fair bit around the generality of American politics, and their sense of their culture, it’s fascinating. I’d never ever claim to have any sort of inside line, I’m just trying to get to grips with it.

Okay, fair enough, but to be clear, I'm absolutely not arguing, at all, that 'the world loves Bernie and Jeremy'. Indeed, as I pointed out in the first post in this chain, only about a third of *Democratic primary voters* vote for Bernie, when he's up against one other opponent, which is the opposite of being some sort of unstoppable political juggernaut.

What's more, I'm also not arguing that because Sanders has energised a proportion of the Democratic party base, that that somehow means that Biden will win Texas (I don't even know what the mechnanism would be for that), or that left-wing ideas have become massively more popular (although they may have become more popular at the margins).

However, we can take a more macro look at this. In America, there are two meaningful political parties, and the vast, vast majority of votes cast in any election are for representatives of those political parties. So it matters, a very large amount, what the candidate who emerges from the primary election believes. It also matters even more, because the majority of states in Senate elections, and congressional districts, never change hands between the parties, and therefore the ideological beliefs of candidates in the primary election dictate the ideological beliefs of the person who will inevitably be elected. Therefore, it's important to pay attention to the changing ideological currents within the two parties.

It is obviously factually correct that parties can and do shift ideologically over time. Not just in terms of the huge reversal between the Republicans and Democrats that occured in the mid-late twentieth century as a response to the civil rights movement, but in terms of smaller shifts with intellectual currents of the time: for instance, the virtual elimination of moderate, north-eastern Republican congress members between 2010 and 2012, and the rise of the 'Tea Party' movement, then the fall of that movement, and a shift towards Trump loyalists over the last four years, etc. These shifts are observable.

There is also an observable shift happening in the Democratic party. It's smaller than the shift in the Republican party, because Democrats are punished very harshly by the weighting the Senate gives to land, and not voters, which means that the average state is 4-5% more conservative than the average voter. This in turn limits the potential for Democrat senators to pursue very left-wing policies. Nevertheless, there has been a shift, which can be observed in both the platforms of *all* the Democrat nominees for president (including Biden), which are much more liberal than Obama's actual policies in government, and in the beliefs of candidates running for Congress in safe seats (who are significantly more liberal than the historical average Democrat).

Is it possible that this shift in policies will lead to a Republican wave? Maybe, but it's unlikely. Is it possible that this shift will lead to a permanent Republican majority? No, because there haven't been 'permanent' (semi-permanent) majorities in American politics for decades, and that's unlikely to start now. Here are three pieces of evidence that the Democrats do not have a hugely unpopular platform: 1) They won the House in 2018 in one of the largest wave elections in post-war history; 2) They're a long way ahead in the generic Congressional ballot for 2020's elections (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-generic-ballot-polls/?ex_cid=irpromo); 3) Biden is polling ahead of Trump in head-to-head polls. Points 2 and 3 are of course just general predictions about the future, and of course a lot can change and they may well look out of date by November. But my point is, if Americans find the Democratic party platform ideologically abhorrent, they aren't showing it.

[villakram]

Look not a what people say but what they do.

Biden is a right of center, pro neo-liberal politician. (lived here his entire political career)

Obama was a right of center, pro neo-liberal politician. (campaign I as lefty, campaign II as center) 

Sanders is a left of center, anti-neo-liberal politician.  (lefty since the beginning)

Trump is a whichever way the wind blows, but primarily right of center, pro neo-liberal politician. (broken compass... what's a compass?!?)

Democracy...

Edited April 9, 2020 by villakram

[villakram]